Google’s URL Shortener Becomes Public

Google’s URL shortener service goo.gl has become public and anyone can use this for shortening their URLs. The URL shortener gives some interesting stats about the shortened URL and seems to be pretty good. Earlier goo.gl was not public and nobody could use it for URL shortening purposes. Google’s plan to publicly provide access to this URL shortening service makes it much easier for the users to share, tweet and email interesting links.
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The Two URL Shortener Tools That I Use

I mainly use the URL shortener tools for using it through Twitter. Since Twitter allows only 140 characters per post, it is difficult to Tweet posts with longer URLs.  The URL shortener tool shortens the long URL and makes it suitable to post via Twitter. When a visitor clicks on this shortened URL the visitor get redirected to the original URL. The two main tools that I use for this purpose are BudUrl and Bit.ly.

Initially I used BudUrl for shortening my URLs and posting them in Twitter. This tool gives the number of clicks occured on that shortened URL along with the IP address and IP Host name. The tools also offers advanced features and graph if we upgrade our account, but since I am not interesting in upgrading I didn’t go for that. The main drawback that I noticed with BudUrl is that there was a huge difference in the number of clicks shown in BudUrl and Google Analytics. For example if BudUrl shows 20 clicks, only 2 or 3 clicks would be displayed in Google Analytics and that too in the direct traffic section. I am still not able to find why this difference occurs.

Then I started using another URL shortener known as Bit.ly, which I found bit more interesting. This Then I started using another URL shortener known as Bit.ly, which I found bit more interesting. This tool showed features such as the number of clicks, referrers, locations etc. There was no option for upgrading, but the main thing that I was interested was that the difference in the number of clicks shown by Bit.ly and Google Analytics was not too high when compared to BudUrl. For example if the number of clicks in Bit.ly was 20, then Google Analytics showed 16-18 and that also in the direct traffic section.